People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

There is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons.

The brain abhors discrepancies.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

What the neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.